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Sunday, September 13, 2009

It's been a good innings

So I'm moving blogs again - after 792 posts on Blogger! It's been a good innings, but Blogger has been achy for editing stuff for a while now, and Movable Type Open Source's features and Gandi.net's drop-dead prices allow me to go for it, so I'm going for it. You can continue reading my life at blog.ggvaidya.com, which unfortunately means a whole lot of broken links (oh, pooh).

I don't know about my other blogs at the moment; so far, I'm fine with keeping them on Blogger (especially code.ggvaidya.com, which is plugged into Iron Men of Perl), but I guess I'll probably move them eventually. I'm really excited about what MT can do for family.ggvaidya.com!

So: thanks for reading so far, and I hope it Gave You Pleasure. Click on to blog.ggvaidya.com (there will be some issues while I get my blog set up, but it should perfectly good to go once that happens). The blog you are currently reading will revert to worldzunlimited.blogspot.com, its original name.

And last but not least: thanks for all the fantastic services, Blogger, and I'll see you again in the future!

Tuesday, August 18, 2009

A decent day

Blogger is breaking in stranger and mysteriouser ways every day, but - thanks to somebody understanding how HTML forms are supposed to work - it lets me POST content into its script, and that's all I really care about. But I would really appreciate that WebKit feature wherein you can rearrange form elements on the fly ... oh well, can't have everything, I guess.

So, a decent day. A valient attempt at getting my clothes to the drycleaners failed miserably, but what to do. Took a painful train to work, when I spent ages trying to work my holiday into order - my workmates needed my dates as badly as I did! Finally managed to make it work, and am now booked on my first Tiger Airlines (Airways?) flight ever, taking me on a holiday from August 19 to August 29.

Getting this monstrous worry out of the way immediately boosted productivity, and I'm almost all the way to deployment tomorrow (I hope). Got home, managed to get some thinking/writing stuffs done for FOSA/SFDS, and then finally reintegrated the Nexus codonposset stuff from the other branch so SequenceMatrix has some of the features it had earlier, except with a sudden lack of inexplicable crashes on the Macintosh.

What does all of this mean? With any luck, I've cleared a small window tomorrow to just work on FOSA stuff and try to check that I've got all outstanding tasks resolved before my holiday. Work should be okay, too, with most of the pre-deployment work done and other competent people around in the office to help. And with any luck, I'll be able to get up early enough to find a drycleaners and/or deliver a package to Bugis.

So, on the whole, a decent day, with a possibility of having most of my pre-departure business sorted out before actual departure on Wednesday - a new and wonderful thing! Let's see how badly tomorrow and especially day after ruin the general effect :).

Sunday, August 16, 2009

Sunday dreamin'

So, I just woke up. Like, right now (well, more like 3:30pm SGT, but you can't stress the short stuff like that). This is a fantastic achievement for me, as it has been months (years, maybe!) since I've woken up this late. Heck, I played board games all night a few weeks ago, and even then I moseyed home at six, slept at seven, and then was up again by one. Three thirty is a mountain that few men dare to tread, and today I trod all over it with joy and happiness.

Part of the joy was the dream I was having before I woke up, which was long, complicated and had a cute girl in it. Also, there were two dogs, so it wasn't all great, but it was still pretty nice nevertheless.

Next steps is to get myself ready-to-go, and then to-go to Pizza Hut and get myself that spagetti I've been craving. If I time it correctly, I might even be able to go the gym later tonight, which would be a very nice thing. But could that be even more Sunday dreamin'?

Another thing: the Indian trip. Now, it's definitely going ahead - I have to book tickets, and unless the wedding itself is cancelled, I can't back out then. But I also need a vacation, just some time off by myself to do with as I please. So how is that going to work? Fly to Delhi, then do a few-days trip to Jaipur or Nainital or Agra? Fly into Hyderabad, then fly on to Delhi, then come back to chill in Hyderabad for a bit? Decisions, decisions, and my ability to make such decisions is shrinking with the drip-drip of passing time. So tonight I'ma have to call it. Let's see how that goes.

Saturday, August 15, 2009

Oh look, Twitter's having problems again

It's been a fairly frustrating and unproductive week, and I've been looking forward to the weekend for so long and with such passion I can't even begin to explain. There's so many little non-work things I need to catch up on, many of them small-scale even by the fairly unambitious standards of non-work things. And I'm being slowly engulfed by the drying, crackling flames of burnout, which is particularly worrying. This holiday - even though it's going to be a lot less fun that I thought - could not have come at a better time.

Of course, one nice thing about a last-minute travel plan upset is I get to fiddle. How cool would it be to travel back to Almora? Or Nainital? Or even just Agra? This bears thinking - no, dreaming! - about.

Back in the uprightangled world, I need to somehow manage to work parts of my body right off, while avoiding burning out so I can redeliver myself to work in a seminormal state on Monday, while somehow also keeping up the vague shadow of a social life I've somehow managed to maintain over the last few weeks. Tricky, yes. Possible, well - there's really only one way to find out, isn't there.

Monday, August 10, 2009

Sometimes I impress even me

Okay, so I'm going to stipulate that those two tall buildings with funky things on their roof is no less than the buildings I grew up in. I guess this based entirely on that curve in the street, which I vaguely remember from somewhere I once saw or something (it helps that Judges Court road is mostly straight except for this one bit), and on "New Road", which I remember geographically is where my preschool and the local video store used to be, and which Google confirms my preschool to be located on - a confirmation I got after the fact, by the way. So I basically googled "Judges Court Road", moved up and down a bit, saw the curve, saw the buildings, and put my finger down - "here".

If I'm right, then I just impressed myself with my map-retention abilities. If I'm wrong - oh well, I needed a blogpost before I could sleep tonight :).

August 10, 2009: Okay, found both my school (confirmed with Wikipedia) and (I think) the library, the zoo and Victoria Memorial. Impressiver and impressiver!

Sunday, August 09, 2009

Forever, for ever and the Bubble

Okay, this is a long overdue blogpost, but I've got Things To Do, so I hope you'll excuse me if I hurry it up. I promised myself I'd write this while bunking in with my cousin in Bombay; he's now in London, his daughter (my niece!) is all growned up, and the relationships I was thinking about then fail to signify (or, you know, signify especially hard right now, depending). But if there's one thing I've got going for me these days, it's that I've managed to keep Things To Do coming up through the cracks. I'm going to spend a large chunk of today hanging out with some cool people and watching a supposedly-good movie (although what I really want to watch is something else altogether - such guiltiness!), and there ain't no universe in which that's a bad thing, period. I will refuse to argue this point.

So: concepts of forever. I love words which seem to tease at themselves, and forever's one of them, I think (another one? The rapist/therapist. Always makes me giggle). Forever really means "for ever", implying a stretch of uncountable centuries, rather than an impossible point of time in the dim reaches of tomorrow. A girl I cared very much about a long time ago pointed out something else: in human time spans, forever doesn't signify. Creatures living for a half-dozen decades can hardly hope to hold in their little monkey brains the idea of time stretching out forever (or for ever) in all directions. Instead, she postulated, "forever is as far into the future as we can't see beyond" (paraphrasing, of course, and my sincerely apologies if I've messed it up).

There is something else - the Bubble, which I will not spend time explaining and describing in any great detail. But imagine if you "bubble off" a bit of time: time proceeds linearly, then something happens and the bottom falls out of the universe: you're suddenly in negative time, hanging free off the string of time. The impossible happens frequently, life seems charmed, happiness is pure and infectious and there's no problem which can't be solved by love. Then, with the impossible whoosh of enforced acceleration associated with such things, time slowly starts up again and returns to its normal speed. Life returns to well-known haunts and paths, love is no longer supreme, and the universe can slowly return to its usual clichés - loneliness, unhappiness, pointlessness, and all the dreary machinations of life.

Contemplate that a minute. One of the tricks of being inside that Bubble is that, unsustainable and transient though it may seem, it does feel like it goes on forever - and if you can't really see the end until you break out through the Bubble's fragile skin, then wouldn't you say it goes on forever? And, atleast for me, I didn't really believe it was going to end - it's like watching stars in the sky; you know that you are looking into the distant past of these entities you admire, but you don't really accept it. Interstellar distances, as a very intelligent man once put it, simply won't fit into human understanding.

I'm supposed to contemplate The Bridge Across Forever as well, which I have mixed ideas about (liked the first half, got turned off in the second half and so never finished it).

I'm blogging about this because I found a little note in an old book of mine to write about this from years and years ago, so I must comply. Twitter's also broken for me, which is why I must relearn (temporarily, I hope) to express myself in chunks of more than a hundred and forty characters.

Wednesday, June 10, 2009

One hundred days

There's a very chirpy article about Mr. Singh, recently re-elected Prime Minister of India. Incredibly optimistic, it's very heartening at a time when India is slowly climbing up my list of countries-I-want-to-end-up-in.

Since I'm oh-so Indopolitical tonight, I might as well mention my concern at a BBC article on dynastic politics in India, jumping off from Ms. Sangma's entry into politics (her father was once Speaker of the national Parliament). Newsweek suggests that perhaps Mr. Gandhi (the Congress prince expectant) does not mean to lead the party himself, but is try to engage the people to join in. Remember that he has also repeatedly said during the last couple of years that in his view one of the most important tasks before him is to democratise the Congress and hold internal elections (so sayth the BBC). Perhaps — and I say this entirely in my post-chirpy-article mood, mind — maybe perhaps he will never be Prime Minister; instead, he is trying to replicate within the country's oldest political party what has sort-of been achieved in the country itself: thriving, crazy, beautiful, dangerous, shiny, shining democracy.

I'd be skeptical; there's that thing about power corrupting to contend with, and lighting a flame under the monstrous Indian political juggernaut would be hard in the best of cases. But? Maybe that's all hope is, the ability to ask "But?" in the face of all opposition. I think I will assume the worse, but I'd deeply, deeply love to be wrong.

"A beach house," he said, "doesn't even have to be on the beach. Though the best ones are. We all like to congregate," he went on, "at boundary conditions". "Really?" said Arthur. "Where land meets water. Where earth meets air. Where body meets mind. Where space meets time. We like to be on one side, and look at the other."